and this is why nor AMD nor nVidia give a flying porcupine about the GPU prices, someone's buying them anyway.

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Yeah, crypto currency farmers who go straight to the supplier and/or manufacturer with a lorry and suitcases full of cash, in exchange for pallet loads of GPUs.

A sad state of affairs, but not for AMD and Nvidia's profit margin. There should be a dearth of second hand GPUs when either the market crashes, or the next raft of cards are released. Although the value of cards which have been run for 24/7 on full load is questionable.

This is pretty great for Nvidia and AMD, AMD especially. Miners are buying AMD GPUs as fast as they can be produced. In this way, the fact that AMD's product offering isn't competing with Nvidia has been essentially made moot. They have come out with an underwhelming product with Vega and yet can't produce them quickly enough.

While it's not something that will continue indefinitely, AMD's balance sheets will be looking good for it nonetheless and maybe this will buy them the time and resources they need to R&D a product that properly competes with Nvidia like in the old days.

As time goes by, fewer gamers with AMD hardware will damage their brand mindshare, but in the short term it doesn't matter if it's gamers or miners buying their products; the colour of their money is the same.

Remember that the inflated GPU prices do not trickle back to Nvidia/AMD (or even back to the card OEMs). All that extra profit is skimmed entirely by retailers, and possibly by distributors under-the-table. Increased sales volumes do help, but Nvidia at least was hardly sitting on mountains of unsellable GPUs.

Remember that the inflated GPU prices do not trickle back to Nvidia/AMD (or even back to the card OEMs). All that extra profit is skimmed entirely by retailers, and possibly by distributors under-the-table. Increased sales volumes do help, but Nvidia at least was hardly sitting on mountains of unsellable GPUs.

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THIS

If the profits went straight back to AMD, they would have made a helluva lot more than $71m in actual profit last quarter. OCUK, Scan, Ebuyer etc however, well I bet they had good Christmas parties...